The Gordian Protocol

by David Weber

  A seat appeared there, and Philo rounded her and sank into it. Virtual controls for the Kleio’s guns and armor lit up in front of him, and he cracked his knuckles.

  “Good.” She adjusted the position and angle of each virtual display, then eased forward on the throttle. A simulated fraction of the g-forces pressed her into the seat, providing feedback without being uncomfortable or distracting.

  “Let’s start by working on the throttle.” She dropped the thrust to zero. “That okay with you?”

  “Sure. Just guide me through how you want it to work.”

  “First, set it up so I can pull the throttle in any direction. Have the thrust applied on a matching vector.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “Next, it needs to provide more resistance the closer it gets to maximum. And finally, it should center itself if I let up.”

  “Got it, and done.”

  “All right.” She flexed her fingers and gripped the controls again. She was about to pull the throttle to the side, but stopped and faced Philo. “Hey, another question?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Can I make stuff in this simulation, too?” She glanced quickly at his helmet.

  “Sure you can,” Philo replied, sounding a little baffled by the question. “I just figured I would take care of that since you’re new to working in an abstraction.”

  “I’d like to give it a try.”

  “In that case, be my guest.” He leaned back and gestured across the emptiness before them. “What do you want to make?”

  “It’s a surprise.” She smiled as she opened a new set of menus. “But given your tastes, I think you’ll like it.”

  “You mean…”

  “Yeah, it’s something for you. You’re doing all of this for me, so I want to make something for you. We’re going to be partners in this, so why not?”

  “Umm…” he shrugged. “Okay, sure. Why not?”

  “This is allowed, right? I’m not inadvertently offending you or something?”

  “No, certainly not!” Philo reassured quickly. “I just didn’t expect this. In fact, I’ve never had a physical citizen make me an abstraction before, and I’m older than I look.”

  “First time for everything, huh?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Can you forward me those eBooks with the cockpit pictures? I think I know where to find what I’m looking for.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio

  non-congruent

  “So here’s the bad news.” Benjamin said once Raibert and Elzbietá had joined him on the bridge.

  “Did you really have to start off like that?” Raibert leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “I was having a really good day until now.”

  “Stop it, Raibert,” Elzbietá warned. “Let him speak.”

  He held up his hands apologetically.

  “This needs to be said, and said clearly,” Benjamin began. “I’m still confident I’ve accurately identified the Event, but my knowledge of 1940 is sketchy at best compared to other periods. I know Hitler wasn’t supposed to die on his way to Berlin on May 16, but the literature Philo picked up has conflicting reports of the attack. That means I don’t know for certain how the Admin version of the timeline played out. Not to the detail we need to plan our alterations. There’s a lot of historical confusion surrounding his death, so what actually happened is one of the minor mysteries of World War II.”

  “Okay,” Raibert sighed. “That’s bad.”

  “Even worse,” Benjamin continued, “I don’t know what actually happened in the SysGov timeline. May 16, 1940, is a day of no historical significance, at least as far as my other self, who also isn’t a World War II expert, is concerned. I hate to admit this, but my memories can’t help us beyond identifying the day and place.”

  “Then wouldn’t the original Event have been fairly routine?” Elzbietá suggested.

  “Maybe,” Benjamin stressed. “But that leaves a lot of questions. Was there an attack in the original timeline? If so, how was it thwarted? If not, what caused it to be aborted? What security procedures were in place? How did those procedures succeed in one timeline and fail in another? What military assets were on hand in one version and not the other? Why was there a discrepancy? Was the attack partially successful? If so, who should live and who should die on that train? I don’t know.”

  Raibert let out a frustrated growl and raked a hand through his hair.

  “So that’s the bad news,” Benjamin concluded.

  “Look, we don’t need to change the Event back perfectly,” Raibert said. “If we had to do that, there’s no way we could ever succeed. Fortunately for us, time is straining to return to its original form. It should snap back if we get the Event close enough to the original.”

  “Should?” Benjamin asked pointedly.

  “That’s what we see in the Knot,” Raibert shot back. He pushed off the wall and walked up to the command table. “The change in this timeline is what’s entangled all those other universes. Each one is tugging on the whole, trying to return to normal, but they can’t because of the Event. If we fix it, or even partially fix it, it might be enough for the whole mess to break free and return to its original state.”

  “But if we fail in our first attempt, then all we’ve done is made it worse. Time becomes even more scarred, and we’ve failed.”

  “I’m not going to sit back and let Shigeki and his goons win,” Raibert growled at Benjamin and leaned forward. “At some point, we’re going in with the information we have.”

  “I actually agree with you completely on that.”

  “You do?” the big man blinked and backed off.

  “That’s right. And the good news is I know exactly where to get the expertise we need.”

  “Oh.” The fire drained from Raibert’s voice. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “We need someone with firsthand knowledge of World War II and, most importantly, German military organizations and procedures. I believe that will give us the advantage we need to get the Event as close as possible to the original.”

  “So you want me to pick up another hitchhiker?” Raibert asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Hmm, I don’t know…”

  “What’s wrong?” Elzbietá asked.

  “Well, it’s just I have such fond memories of meeting the two of you. You reacted so well at first. You know, besides brandishing a knife, threatening to blow my brains out, and trying to strangle me.”

  “This is different,” Benjamin insisted. “I’ve met the individual, and he’s also family. I know I can get him to listen. Even to a story as crazy as ours.”

  “All right.” Raibert gave him an indifferent wave. “Who is this guy?”

  “Graf Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder.”

  “Wow. Now that’s a name and a half. So he served in the German military?”

  “He joined the Reichswehr in 1926, following our long-standing family tradition. Von Schröders had served Germany—and Prussia before that, and Brandenburg before that—since well before 1600 when the Barony of Schröder was created. He was raised with the understanding that military service was both his destiny and his highest calling, and he grew to adulthood seeing the weakness of the Weimar Republic and the bloody street fighting between Bolsheviks and the freikorps.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t an expert on World War II?”

  “Neither version of me is,” Benjamin said, and for a moment he wondered how he’d ever come to utter a sentence that strange. “But the family history part of it I’m quite familiar with.”

  “Ah. Well, I guess that makes sense. So this guy is pretty well known inside your family?”

  “You could say that,” Benjamin flashed a grin and continued. “In 1940, at the time Hitler was assassinated, my grandfather was in France commanding a battalion of motorized infantry attached to Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division. In the timeline we’r
e trying to restore, he was seriously wounded in the fighting and, when he returned to active duty, he was transferred to intelligence duties. Eventually, he ended up serving under a fellow named Reihard Gehlen in Fremde Heere Ost, the organization inside the General Staff responsible for analysis and counter-intelligence against the Soviet Union. He and Gehlen were both active in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 but managed to escape detection. After the war, he continued in the Gehlen Organization—an intelligence service set up by Gehlen and the US mostly to keep an eye on Stalin and the USSR. That eventually morphed into the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the federal intelligence service of West Germany, in 1956, and he served as one of its senior officers until he retired in 1960.

  “But things went a little differently in the Admin timeline. In a lot of ways.

  “First, there was a huge succession fight inside Germany following Hitler’s assassination, and it did enormous damage to the Nazi party. While the army and the SS divisions were moving into France, what amounted to a civil war broke out in Germany behind them. The Prussian police, the Luftwaffe, and about half the Gestapo supported Herman Goering, who was openly allied with Rudolph Hess; most of the SS, the rest of the Gestapo, and some of the SA backed Heinrich Himmler; and the rest of the SA and some of the SS backed Joseph Goebbels. At the moment all this began, the Army—my grandfather included—was too busy invading France to take sides back home.

  “But that changed when Himmler made the serious mistake of arresting—and shooting—Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch ‘on suspicion of complicity in the Fuhrer’s murder’ and issuing orders for the arrest of all three Army group commanders in France. He apparently hoped to decapitate the Army’s leadership before any organized resistance to himself or the Nazi Party could form. Unfortunately for him, while he managed to execute Brauchitsch, his attempt to arrest the Army group commanders failed miserably, which led to the open fighting in France between SS formations and regular Army formations shortly after the British surrender at Dunkirk. The fighting didn’t end well for the SS, and Erwin Rommel and—under his command—Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder, played a prominent role in suppressing the Nazi-loyal SS divisions. They were fast, they were ruthless, and it was bloody as hell.”

  “Fast and bloody suppression, huh?” Raibert mused. “And he has a history of killing Nazis? I’m liking this guy already.”

  “With Brauchitsch dead and Himmler blamed for his death, the Army swung its support largely to Goering and Hess. They formed what might be considered the ‘conservative’ wing of the German power struggle, and they enjoyed the backing of many German industrialists and the upper class, as well as support from the Army, Luftwaffe, and Navy.

  “Back home in Germany, Army units, Luftwaffe units, Gestapo, and even regular uniformed police came into conflict in several cities. The actual armed combat went on for no more than a couple of weeks, with Himmler—handicapped by having so much of the SS’s manpower neutralized in France—quickly losing ground. Goebbels made the mistake of throwing in with Himmler immediately after Hitler’s assassination because of his personal rivalry with Goering, and the two of them, plus a fellow named Reinhard Heidrick, were rounded up and shot somewhere in Zwikau in August 1940.

  “Most everyone in Germany breathed a sigh of relief following the executions. But that still left Hess and Goering, and if this part of history is any indicator, Nazis are very good at eating their own.

  “Hess was assassinated in October of 1940, ostensibly by a diehard SS officer loyal to Himmler. In fact, that’s probably what happened, but the general belief in Germany was that Goering had decided to eliminate his last true rival. Neither the Army nor the Navy were at all happy with the situation, and the tinderbox ignited when a local Luftwaffe commander attempted to forcibly disarm an Army battalion whose commander, he erroneously believed, was prepared to attempt a coup against Goering. That battalion commander was Oberstleutnant Graf von Schröder, and the result was an unmitigated disaster for the Luftwaffe CO.”

  “Your grandfather doesn’t take crap from anyone, does he?” Raibert chuckled.

  “You could certainly say that,” Benjamin agreed, returning the smile. “In fairness to the Luftwaffe guy, Grandad had decided he really hated the Nazis—in both universes—even before the war broke out. Something called Kristallnacht in 1938 had a lot to do with that. The Luftwaffe guy was a member of the party and apparently pretty damned arrogant about it, and that had to’ve rubbed Grandad the wrong way even before the idiot screwed the pooch by trying to disarm his men.

  “Anyway, Grandad’s reaction—and what happened to the Luftwaffe—was the spark that set off open fighting again in September, and this time, the conflict went on for several months as the regular armed forces started fighting each other, and my grandfather led his troops to victory in some of the worst urban battles of the conflict.”

  “Yep.” Raibert nodded. “Liking this guy more and more.”

  “Then in February 1941, Goering was killed by a roadside bomb in Berlin, which created fresh chaos and an enormous void at the top of the political structure. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwher, Admiral Eric Raeder from the Navy, and Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstet from the Army stepped in to fill that void.

  “The Luftwaffe and the remnant of the SS were pretty much crushed by June 1941, and, to the astonishment of non-German observers, the Triumvirate formed by Canaris, Raeder, and von Rundset invited Kronprinz Louis Ferdinand to assume the old imperial crown. No one outside Germany saw it coming, but the national mourning when Louis Ferdinand’s older brother Wilhelm was killed in France suggested that the House of Hohenzolleran retained a lot more public support than those non-Germans—or the Nazis, for that matter—had suspected. I don’t know if the Triumvirate did suspect that or if they simply saw him as a last, desperate alternative to the now thoroughly discredited Nazis. Whatever they may have thought, though, it worked.

  “Louis Ferdinand agreed to a new constitution which was roughly based on the pre-World War I imperial constitution but with clearer limitations on the Crown’s powers, and he assumed the throne officially on January 1, 1942.”

  “That’s all very fascinating,” Raibert acknowledged, “but can we get back to your granddad? I want to hear more about him.”

  “I’m getting there,” Benjamin said. “I have to set the stage first. Anyway, Germany contacted Great Britain and basically said ‘Look, those lunatic Nazis, who our soon-to-be monarch bitterly opposed—and that actually seems to have been true, by the way—got us into this stupid war with the wrong people. At the moment, as you’re undoubtedly aware, we’re still significantly stronger militarily than you are, except at sea. However, we have no wish to continue fighting, so we propose turning the cease-fire into a permanent peace treaty.’ This along with the return of a significant portion of the territories the Nazi regime had seized—and the repatriation of the entire British Expeditionary Force, after its surrender at Dunkirk—eventually led to the Treaty of Berlin—the peace treaty between Germany, France, Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, and Poland—which was signed in Berlin in March 1942.”

  “Still waiting for the granddad to show up again,” Raibert complained.

  “Getting there,” Benjamin replied. “When the treaty was signed, Joseph Stalin became deeply alarmed by the growing rapprochement between Imperial Germany and its erstwhile enemies in France and the British Empire. Unlike Germany, he refused to relinquish his share of the Polish conquests, partly out of sheer greed but also because he’d become more convinced than ever that he needed a defensive frontier as far west as he could get one. He saw a restored Germany which was possibly even more dangerously anti-Bolshevik than the Nazis had been, and therefore a threat to him and the Soviet Union.

  “Overall, the various European communist parties were steadily losing power and members. Stalin saw the Soviet Union becoming even more of a pariah nation than ever, cut off by and isolated from Western Europe. And then Louis Ferdinand and h
is Foreign Ministry released the Nazi’s secret pre-war treaties with Russia, which made it pretty damned clear what Stalin had been planning before Hitler’s assassination.

  “By December 1944, an increasingly paranoid Stalin had largely completed his own rearmament program and the reform of the Red Army, and there were ‘spontaneous’ pro-Communist uprisings in Hungary and Romania. The Red Army mobilized and moved in, summoned by its ‘fraternal socialist brothers,’ at which point the Kaiser demanded Stalin withdraw his troops. Stalin ignored all diplomatic efforts. Germany mobilized as part of the Western Alliance, and the Great Eastern War began in April 1945.

  “By then, Klaus-Wilhelm had been promoted to generalmajor—the equivalent of a brigadier general—and placed in command of an armored brigade in Army Group South. He served with distinction as the panzer commander who spearheaded the advance through the Balkans and into Ukraine, and by the end of the war, he was a generaloberst—or a four-star general—in command of an entire Panzer army of several corps. He’s the man most recognized for the liberation of the Ukraine in the war that finally overthrew Joseph Stalin in August 1951. In fact, he was so beloved by the people of the Ukraine, that they asked Louis Ferdinand to name him as their provisional governor, and he served in that post from 1952 until 1958, when the Republic of Ukraine became a full member of the United Nations.”

  “All right! All right!” Raibert held up his hands. “The guy has impressive credentials. I get it. You realize you sold me at swift and bloody suppression, right? So where and when do we make contact?”

  Click.

  “I think 1958, at the tail end of his governorship, is our best bet,” Benjamin said. “Almost all of the partisan attacks by diehard Communists had ended by then, so it should be easier to approach him. He’d be fifty-two years old at that point, but according to my dad, he was still a dauntingly fit veteran who’d survived over a quarter century of active military service, including some of the most intense combat in human history. He was certainly still a tough of guy by the time I knew him!”